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Six years ago I started working furiously on this little side project about package management for Windows. It started to grow and over time it became clear that it was going to be something important. A community flourished and there was a tremendous uptake for this little tool. Fast forward to present, starting soon I will be focused solely on Chocolatey as the Founder of Chocolatey Software, Inc*! It's an exciting opportunity to really see where we can take this Windows software management thing! ......

This is a very exciting time for Chocolatey! Over the past 5 years, there have been some amazing points in Chocolatey's history. Now we are less than 10 days from another historical moment for Chocolatey - when licensed editions become available for purchase! This is the moment when we are able to offer features that enable businesses to better manage software through Chocolatey and offer non-free features to our community! This also marks when the community (and organizations) take the next step ......

Chocolatey turned 5 years old recently! I committed the first lines of Chocolatey code on March 22, 2011. At that time I never imagined that Chocolatey would grow into a flourishing community and a tool that is widely used by individuals and organizations to help automate the wild world of Windows software. It's come a long way since I first showed off early versions of Chocolatey to some friends for feedback. Over the last 2 years things have really taken off! The number of downloads has really ......

Right now I’m on the train on my way back from Chicago. It’s interesting to be drinking a Corona and hanging out in the lounge while I’m watching the miles go by. Chicago was a nice time. I had never been so we decided to vacation in Chicago and see the sites – posts coming at the other blog. My presentation was on UppercuT. It was a small group that came to the presentation which makes for an more engaging audience. Overall it was a pretty good presentation and I enjoyed it. We got a little comfortable ......

Well just after three years of having https://chocolatey.org, we’ve finally implemented package moderation. It’s actually quite a huge step forward. This means that when packages are submitted, they will be reviewed and signed off by a moderator before they are allowed to show up and be used by the general public. What This Means for You Package Consumers Higher quality packages - we are working to ensure by the time a package is live, moderators have given feedback to maintainers and fixes have ......

Chocolatey was just featured on LifeHacker! http://lifehacker.com/59424... I was ecstatic to hear about this, of course now I need to write an actual comparison between chocolatey and other windows package managers. Comments on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/com... ......

I recently attended PuppetConf 2013 (the 3rd annual event) and all I can say coming away from that is wow. It was an amazing event with quite a few amazing speakers and sessions out there. There were over 100 speakers and more than 1200 attendees. And we had live streaming for quite a few sessions and keynotes that had a huge attendance (I don’t remember the number off the top of my head). With seven tracks going at a time, not including demos or hands on labs, it was quite an event. Disclaimer: ......

Fear holds us back from many things. A little fear is healthy, but don’t let it overwhelm you into missing opportunities. In every career there is a moment when you can either step forward and define yourself, or sit down and regret it later. Why do we hold back: is it fear, constraints, family concerns, or that we simply can't do it? I think in many cases it comes to the unknown, and we are good at fearing the unknown. Some people hold back because they are fearful of what they don’t know. Some ......

Companies want to hire the type of person that is cut out to be a remote worker. The type of person that can be a remote worker is the type of person that excels at their work and that is what companies are always looking for. In the first part of this series we talked about what remote work is and how a business benefits from remote workers. In this article we are going to focus on you. What does it take to be a remote worker? Is remote work possible in your job? How do you work from home when there ......

As software creators we don't get to decide what version of our tools / libraries that people use. If we try to force them, our users will go somewhere else. Update: What Type of Software This Applies To This post talks of tools, applications and libraries. Things that end up in the users hands. This does not apply to SaaS or websites. These do not end up in the hands of the users in the same sense. For those of you who immediately think of Chrome or Firefox, which are applications that end up in ......

Last weekend I went up to Iowa Code Camp in Cedar Rapids and had the opportunity to do two presentations, one on NuGet and one known as the Automation Tools Roundup. ICC is one of my favorite conferences every year. It is twice a year and I try to make it to at least one of them. The people that attend this conference really make it worth the money you spend in travel expenses. Definitely recommended. Automation Tools Roundup This is my favorite session to give because it requires crowd participation ......

It appears that my work in the community and the nominations received from others has secured my status as an MVP for a second year. Thank you all for the award and thank you everyone (including Microsoft) for valuing my contributions to the community. I noticed last year I did quite a bit of travelling and talks. I’m going to need to work hard to keep that up this year. I’m also hoping to gear up for the v1 release of RoundhousE and DropkicK as well as something new I’ve been working on known as ......

The thing to realize is that the destination is never the most important part of the journey. It’s the journey itself. When you start a journey, you are never fully sure where it is going to end up. We started the journey down package management for .NET three times with Nu[bular] (we in this context means the nu team, not me in particular, I was only involved in the last reboot) before we decided to try an existing infrastructure with Ruby Gems. I have always said that I would use the best tool ......

Recently I was able to attend and speak at Heartland Developer Conference (HDC). This was my first time at the conference and it went smoothly for me. I was able to attend most of the sessions and had a great time! I had a session on Database Change Management w/RoundhousE! It went really well, I was very relaxed although I only had 45 minutes to talk. One item of feedback I got was that I didn’t seem interested in what I was talking about. It was just that I was very relaxed having practiced and ......

Yesterday I attended KCDC in Kansas City. It was a great time and I had the opportunity to spend time with people much smarter than me. Even with all of the people I already know, I met quite a few new people during the day long conference. I gave a talk on RoundhousE. If you attended that presentation, the slide deck is here: RoundhousE presentation (right click and save target as...and download or rename the extension to .PPTX). The presentation went really well despite starting off a little slow. ......

Recently I was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Visual C#. For those that don’t know it’s an annual award based on nominations from peers and Microsoft. Although there are just over 4,000 MVPs worldwide from all kinds of specializations, there are less than 100 C# MVPs in the US. There is more information at the site: https://mvp.support.microso... The Microsoft MVP Award is an annual award that recognizes exceptional technology community leaders worldwide who actively ......

Last weekend I had the opportunity to give back to the community doing what I love. As geeks we don’t usually have this opportunity. The event is called Coders 4 Charities (C4C) and it’s a grueling weekend of coding for nearly 30 hours over the weekend. When you finish you get to present to the charity and all of the other groups what you have completed. From the site: Coders For Charities is a 3-day charity event that pairs charities and local software developers. Charities often do not have the ......

Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. ......

If you are seeing text messages coming in from the year 2016 and thinking this is a total WTF (mate?!), put down the phone. There is no need to break the phone. It’s fine. Nearly all WM phones are experiencing this right now. I repeat, there is no need to break the phone! There is a fix for this that requires maybe five minutes of your time. DISCLAIMER: You do this on your own terms. I am in no way liable if you follow these instructions and damage or render useless anything at all including but ......

Today marks the beginning of a new year. For many of us that means new resolutions like losing weight or quitting smoking. I tend not to focus on resolutions because I am horrible about keeping them. I usually set goals instead of making resolutions. And when I do set goals I intend for them to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timed). I’ve found that having goals that are measurable and realistic within a given time frame help me focus on how I want to get there from where I ......

public class DevliciousBlog { IBlogger _blogger; public Devlicious(IBlogger blogger) { _blogger = blogger; } } public class Program { private static void Main(string[] args) { IBlogger rob = new FerventCoder(); DevliciousBlog devlicious = new DevliciousBlog(rob); //awesome follows } } This is not goodbye by any means. Just another opening in my life. I was recently accepted to blog at Devlicio.us. Devlicio.us is a great community and is full of some top notch folks and I look forward to the opportunity ......

Iowa Code Camp was a great time! I really enjoyed the conference itself. It was probably one of the best conferences I have ever been to. There are a lot of talented people surrounding Iowa and I had the pleasure of hanging out with some very intelligent people that are doing some really awesome things. The talk went well as well. Hopefully there were a few more people that got out there and tried UppercuT. Here are the slides from my talk ......

If you are in Des Moines, IA, tomorrow for Iowa Code Camp, I’m speaking on “Automated Builds: How to UppercuT your Code” at 3:45. If you are going to be there and we’ve only met on Twitter before, I’m looking forward to meeting you ......

Topeka DNUG is free for anyone to attend! Mark your calendars now! SPEAKER: Rob Reynolds has been programming in .NET since the early days of 1.0. He is a .NET Developer at FHLBank Topeka, a bank where the doors are always locked and there’s no money inside. He holds a bachelor’s degree in MIS from Kansas State University (don’t hate!) and enjoys spending time with his wife and kid when his wife hasn’t locked him in the basement to work on any of the OSS projects he manages. TOPIC: Automated Builds: ......

<rant> Recently a friend of mine wrote a post about having his comments deleted from a post. It has caused a bit of a controversy because both of them are MVPs. http://flux88.com/blog/a-de... Go ahead and read it, I’ll wait here. Seriously. Some people have said it was a bad thing that he wrote the post. I personally think he did a very good thing. At times it is very important to hold people accountable for something you believe in. While it’s not always the ......

I attended JP's Nothin But .NET last November in Philadelphia and it was the best course I have ever been to! Sooner than you know it will be in Kansas City this year. It starts Monday, August 31, 2009 at 8:00 AM and goes through Friday, September 04, 2009 at 10:00 PM. I can tell you from experience it will probably be over more like at 4AM on Saturday morning! If the price looks like a lot, keep in mind that this price is REALLY CHEAP for the amount of training and learning that you receive. This ......

Ben Scheirman posted this in his Google Reader tips. He mentioned that he found it on Lifehacker. This is what it looks like. Too awesome. Not sure what you can do with it, but definitely cool. Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A ......

It doesn’t matter how good you are, the tools do make a difference. That is not to discount the skill of the person that is using the tools. That is not to say that the tools are more important than the person. The most important thing is still the abilities of the person. I recently got a new laptop with SSD. I can say this is the nicest thing I have ever had for a laptop. I can also say that I am definitely enjoying what I like to call “instant” Visual Studio. It’s not really instant, but it loads ......

About two weeks ago, somebody else turned OLD, this year besides me. Someone took quite a bit of time to come up with this scheme. It looked pretty awesome though!!! Not everyone remembers math's Order of Operations and thus some calculate that Dru is turning 58. Dru's Desk. Something is happening here... These pictures seem to be from during the setup. Awesome! Here comes the birthday boy and he can kind of see his desk area over cube heaven. Um... The desk...it's in there somewhere. It took a knife ......

It's long been known to people around me that I love to wear blue. Lately a coworker has been trying to get me to wear pink. She keeps telling me that real men wear pink. I bring this up because my 30th birthday was today and I walked into to see quite a display. But enough with the words... Most of the handiwork was brought to you by Dru. This could be due to other crazy work birthdays. This definitely raises the bar ......

Today I gave a presentation on Windsor Container at KC's Day of Dot Net. The presentation went pretty smoothly, other than accidentally unplugging the projector link. :D I introduced fluent interfaces into my presentation code this time around and it seemed to be somewhat well received. I also added Mass Transit's startable facility to the Windsor configuration and showed how easy it is to use Windsor to leverage production level code. Thanks to all that came! I appreciate the interest and the great ......

Over the past few days I have been honored to be at the Nothin but .NET Developer Boot Camp in Philadelphia, PA. I have also been posting updates every day. A few people have asked me if this course is worth it. I would say if you want to be passionate about what you do (or if you already are), then the answer is a resounding YES!! The sheer amount of benefit you get from knowledge and participation, you may feel like you are a bandit making out with only having had to pay the extremely reasonable ......

Friday was the last day of the training course and today we went over a couple of patterns and had a discussion on Domain Driven Design. After the discussion, we were released to continue working on our end to end solution. The team I was on (Go Conquistadors!) got all the way down to the database second out of four teams. We were first to have all parts vertical though. Then we started to refine our design even more. And that is where we left the solution on Friday night. People Bowing Out As the ......

So you may notice this post is a little late. The course moved to an open format today and the last people left for the night at 4:30 AM. That's 9 AM to 4:30 AM. Basically today we got direction from JP and then formed groups that we worked with all day to implement an end to end solution from the point that we were already at. One of the things you will push yourself for today is understanding fluent interfaces to whatever extent that you can. The other part is how to build them. They are much harder ......

Today the most important thing is Coffee! When you take this course (not if *grin*) you definitely need to get coffee after lunch. Some things of note today: Group Interaction There is a lot more group interaction with tasks and the tasks are getting to a point where they take quite a bit lot longer to complete. Group dynamics has definitely picked up and come into play a lot more because by the third day you are much more comfortable with everyone. I am seeing personalities coming out as we get ......

Today has been awesome! More of what we learned yesterday, plus more. We got more in depth into certain patterns and have had a huge helping of BDD all day long. The format has been that JP has written the specs and we get the tests to pass. The format looks like it will start to shift to JP doing less and less code and us doing more and more of it. Three Project Solution So one thing I immediately picked up on is the 3 project solution. One of the projects holds all of the automation and automated ......

Today I learned I have a lot to learn! Patterns, Delegates, Lambdas, PSake, Extension Methods, etc, etc, etc. Photo credit to Hikako. So far we have went through patterns and principles. Ones that come to mind are the Strategy Pattern, Static Gateway Pattern, Decorators, and Specification Pattern. We also got into SRP (single responsibility principle), OCP (open closed principle), Composition over Inheritance, BDD (behavior driven design), DDD (domain driven design), and then we talked a little about ......

In 1998 I went through Basic Combat Training for the United States Army. It was 9 weeks of grueling, awesome and exhausting training. It was training that definitely pushed the limits of your body and mind. I learned quite a lot and the training forever shaped the person I am today. Next week, I will have the opportunity to go to Boot Camp again, but this time it will be for .NET development. JP Boodhoo, a great guy who I met at Alt.NET, conducts a course known as Nothin' But .NET Developer Boot ......

Photo originally from Engadget. Today I went to Best Buy to pick up a new phone. I've had the HTC Apache (aka the PPC6700 or VX6700) for nearly three years now. I have kept the Apache up to date by putting WM6 on it, otherwise I probably would have switched sooner. I was going to get the HTC Touch Diamond, then I learned of the HTC Touch Pro (HTC 6850). This isn't an iPhone, but it's close enough for me. http://www.htc.com/www/prod... ......

You just realized that you forgot to pay your bill and it was due yesterday. What do you do? Pay it and call customer service immediately. They may be able to help you out, especially if you have been a good customer and are cordial on the phone. There is probably a grace period on your account. Understand that this has nothing to do with how late your payment can be without adverse action. Grace period is how long before the credit company starts charging you interest on new purchases (typically ......

One of my favorite utilities is Notepad2. I had a script to replace the original Notepad with Notepad2 on Windows, but as of Windows XP Service Pack 3, that no longer works. Luckily, I found this script from Travis: @echo off echo *IMPORTANT* echo This will kill all open instances of Notepad. echo To cancel, end this batch file now (ctrl+c), or hit any key to continue. pause echo Killing all instances of notepad running... TASKKILL /F /IM notepad.exe /T echo Backing up... call :backup %systemroot%\servicepackfil... ......

You know you've had a certification a long time when it's retiring. http://www.microsoft.com/le... Not sure if I will get another one yet or not. In the world of programming, I have noticed that certifications really don't seem to mean as much as in other career paths. Some may disagree with me on that statement and that is fine. But having the certification doesn't mean I am better at what I do over the next guy, and it certainly isn't a legal requirement for ......

How old were you when you started programming? Well, most people don't know that I am still kind of new to computers. I grew up poor and my first experience with computers was in high school (Apple IIs and Craptastic Macs). I almost failed keyboarding class in 7th grade (required a minimum of 27 WPM with less than 4 errors/minute). I actually didn't own a computer until I was in my second semester of college. It was a Gateway and it broke so much I got good at fixing computers. That was 1998. I have ......

Say you're too s--tfaced to drive and you pass the keys off to your friend. Your friend has been drinking but you don't know what state they are in. You allow them to make the decision to drive or not. If they decide to drive, is it your fault at all if they drive drunk? Does giving the keys to your friend (because you are too drunk) give you any responsibility in the drunk driving?

Warning: Content not for the squeamish My two year old (still a puppy) Weimaraner did what a dog does yesterday. She finally caught one of the rabbits that she has been chasing in our backyard. I can easily forgive for this, but my wife is not as quick to forgive. According to Wikipedia: It should never be forgotten that the Weimaraner is a hunting dog and therefore has a strong, instinctive prey drive. Weimaraners will sometimes tolerate cats, as long as they are introduced to the cats as puppies, ......